An eminently sensible user’s manual for saving the planet.
On the challenge of wrapping our heads around climate change—and actually doing something about it.
Pilkey, an earth scientist at Duke, and his contributors examine nearly every conceivable facet of how climate change is affecting life on Earth, emphasizing that it won’t just be human life that suffers. Yet humans are the chief culprits, and it’s up to humans to act, even as “we are not mentally equipped to prepare for a slow-moving abstraction like climate change that unfolds over decades and centuries.” It hardly helps that all the bad news about it has a numbing effect. Still, the author and his fellow contributors are confident that some positive action will ensue, since “we’ve been handed what is known in chess as a forced move.” There are paradoxical bits of good and bad news along the way: Flammable forest land area has declined by a quarter between 1983 and 2015, but only because so much forest has been swallowed up by farmland, and—bad news indeed—what we saw in the Lahaina conflagration of 2023 is likely to be repeated time and again: “urban firestorms…[that] will increase in scale and frequency, causing more death and destruction.” There are woes aplenty to report in these pages, but Pilkey and company offer ways in which readers can ameliorate them by taking viable steps such as establishing building codes that “require new houses to be made of fire-resistant materials”; outlawing water-intensive lawns in recognition that “drought and biodiversity loss have rendered the lawn aesthetic, especially as it is practiced in the United States, a hopelessly antiquated custom”; and making behavioral changes in daily life: “Eat more vegetables, drive less, and have fewer children....Stop building in areas at risk from wildfires, floods, sea level rise, storms, and so on.”
An eminently sensible user’s manual for saving the planet.Pub Date: March 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781478025443
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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